Improv pioneer Elaine May completely changed comedy through her influential stage work with Mike Nichols, yet as a director she’s mostly associated with the unfairly maligned mega-bomb Ishtar. ‘They should have warned us that there was a danger of running out of pecan pie.’Ĭast: Charles Grodin, Cybill Shepherd, Jeannie Berlin If it had been a bigger hit, it might have spared us Bohemian Rhapsody – just out of sheer embarrassment. While plenty absurd, Walk Hard lacks the anarchic zaniness of its parodic forebears but makes up for it with direct-hit explosions of its chosen target, from the reductive portrayal of the creative process (the title song shoots to number 1 half an hour after its recorded) and questionable casting (‘I’m Dewey’s 12-year-old girlfriend!’ yells a full-grown Kristen Wiig) to the cradle-to-grave structure. He’s a well-meaning rube turned rock’n’roll pioneer who never quite sheds his dopey innocence, even while getting hooked on stronger and stronger drugs and writing increasingly indulgent songs featuring ‘an army of didgeridoos’. Arriving on the heels of Jamie Foxx’s Oscar-winning Ray Charles impression and the Carter-Cash box-office phenomenon Walk the Line, co-writers Jake Kasdan and Judd Apatow superimpose elements of both – along with not-at-all subtle bits of Elvis, Bob Dylan and Brian Wilson – into the lumpy form of Reilly’s Dewey Cox. Spoofs of the grandly silly Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker variety were decades out of style in 2007, but the genre almost had to be resurrected in order to deliver an all-out roasting of an ascendant brand of awards bait: the prestige musical biopic. ‘Goddamnit, this is a dark fucking period!’Ĭast: John C Reilly, Jenna Fischer, Tim Meadows, Kristen Wiig But Coogan and Brydon have the kind of comic chemistry where that concept can sustain itself across three, almost equally funny films.
#Madcap lancaster movie#
Explaining why is difficult: it’s a road movie that quickly succumbs to travel delirium, that point in a long excursion where boredom, exhaustion and annoyance combine into a sort of euphoria, and things become funny for no reason at all.
#Madcap lancaster series#
Trimmed to film length from a six-episode BBC television series, it’s arranged by director Michael Winterbottom as a series of vignettes that all play out more or less the same way, and yet it’s hysterical. That’s literally the whole thing – and that’s all it needs to be. Here’s what happens in The Trip : Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, playing fictionalised versions of themselves, drive across the English countryside, eating fancy meals, bickering about their careers, singing ABBA and doing a lot of celebrity impressions. ‘I think anyone over 40 who amuses themself by doing impressions needs to take a long, hard look in the mirror.’ 🥰 The greatest romantic comedies of all time No matter your sense of humour - silly or sophisticated, light or dark, surreal or broad - you’ll find it represented here. With the help of comedians like Diane Morgan and Russell Howard, actors such as John Boyega and Jodie Whittaker and a small army of Time Out writers, we believe we’ve found the 100 finest, most durable and most broadly appreciable laughers in history. In considering the movies on this list, we had to ask ourselves: what makes a truly great comedy? There’s many criteria, but one of the most important is the question of: ‘Is this film still funny now, and will it still be funny five years, ten years… a century from now?’ That makes coming up with the best comedy films of all time tricky. One person’s laugh riot is another’s ‘I don’t get it?’. That’s to say nothing of varying tastes in humour. But what’s funny in 1922 might land with a thud in 2022. A well-orchestrated action flick will make viewers’ eyes pop forever, and a truly horrifying movie will scare viewers until the sun explodes. A great drama will resonate through the ages.
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